Ok, during that period I was at University of Texas, majoring in EE and Comp Sci. The profile you guys throw out of a developer is the old school stereotype (I even looked that way for a few periods of my life). I worked for one company where we had a full arcade, several pool tables, fridge full of Jolt Cola, and a slide to get from the programmer's floor to the cafeteria. It wasn't uncommon to see someone sleeping in their cube at 2 or 3 in the am. The same company had dress code for all employees but when it got to dev crew it said "Please wear clothes and bathe"...

I am recently new in the automation industry, from open source development. Currently working on ruby code to connect to ControlLogix... got Micrologix and SLCs down...

 

> A common PLC language would allow vendors to compete for development systems with a level playing field. In theory, the end result would be dramatically improved development software. Remember Taylor or ICOM? ICOM competed with A-B and had a very nice product (still the best I have ever seen, IMHO). <

>Bill

I remember ICOM they were the best then bought by Rockwell (too much competition. All the new Rockwell software is ICOM based

Gary B

 

I guess I was thinking about the DOS based ICOM software, it was super productive for me.  The windows stuff was a few steps backwards for a serious programmer, IMHO.

 Bill Sturm

 

We have to be a bit more specific. Common software would be a huge improvement. They all do RLL, but so far that hasn't helped at all. Don't expect this in our working careers. If PLCs were easily and economically interchangeable, certain vendors would be doomed. The best software with reasonable hardware would be a killer combination.

Regards
cww

 

> I guess I was thinking about the DOS based ICOM software, it was super productive for me.  The windows stuff was a few steps backwards for a serious programmer, IMHO. <

I thought too that when we were forced to go to the Windows based software.

In the end, the windows based stuff won me over. It was tough to convert though.

 

"I thought too that when we were forced to go to the Windows based software.

In the end, the windows based stuff won me over. It was tough to convert though."

There were things gained instantly with the change to Windows versions. Drag and drop of instructions and addresses and so on. But there was stuff that was better in the DOS versions that wasn't replicated or superseded in the initial Win versions and in some cases hasn't been to this day.

APS for example, handled mnemonic import/export much more gracefully than RSL. Screen display, being based on a monospaced font, was inherently neat and so on.

It's like they started on the Windows versions from scratch with no knowledge or interest in the product they were going to replace and released it in the normal software fashion, when it was good enough for release rather than when it was better than what it replaced. I'm a pig, I don't want the benefits of the new version till I can get them without sacrificing what was good about the old version.

I had many of the same gripes with RSLogix 5000 relative to 500. The way they did some UI things was perfectly normal if viewed in isolation, if it were completely unrelated to anything else on the planet. But user keystrokes for some operations were different than in 500 and for no adequate reason. And it certainly would have been reasonable to assume that many of the users would have been regular and experienced 500 users, and to try to make it easy for them to use both products simultaneously.

 

I may be showing my age - there was a product called "Ladders" from WRB Associates that talked to several different manufacturers of PLCs (Modicon and AB being the primary). With a bit of work you could take a PLC-2 program and put it into a Modicon 584 processor. The most important item that they provided was a free form documentation ability. You had 15 rows of 13 characters for every bit/word and unlimited "rung" comments that could be placed anywhere on the printout. It came from a firm that installed PLCs rather than make them so they had developers in mind. This was in the mid 80s, way before ICOM, Taylor and Windows.

Alas, the system was on a PDP-34 computer and they were late to the porting to Windows. Haven't heard of them for 20 years.

Russ K
Phoenix, AZ

 

RSLogix5/500 was neither ICOM nor Rockwell based. That software was built ground up by a team of software developers from ICOM and Rockwell (Milwaukee). It was one of the best teams I've been on. We did the initial development of RSLogix500 in about 12 months and RSLogix5 followed about 12 months after that.

 

Kudos. You did a VERY nice job!

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Logix 5000 was NOT done by the same team. A lot of areas are far less usable, plus stuff that's entirely arbitrary (keystroke sequences to do tasks that apply in all three packages, for instance) is different than 5/500 for no particular reason.

I don't believe they worked as hard on usability and I know they didn't make the effort to make stuff the same that should have and could have been the same.